Hi, I have a Drobo FS which I run with dual redundancy. It has been a lightly used so has been very a trusty NAS - until recently, .

Recently the second bay down reported a drive failure so I replaced it with a brand new Western Digital 2TB drive. It immediately reported the drive also as a failure. I did send it back as the drive although in a new sealed silver bag was not packaged well and you know how couriers can be with packages, yes?

So I ordered a Toshiba 2Tb drive some a completely different supplier to ensure I did not order another drive of possibly a faulty batch. I put this in and again the Drobo FS is reporting the brand new drive as faulty. Luckily one of the drives in the NAS was only a 250Gb drive so I swapped that with the new Toshiba drive and all appears to be well again and the Drobo started building the data protection.

As the new drive is now reporting OK in the bottom bay but not in the second from top bay do I have to assume the second from top bay has failed in some way? And maybe even both the original drive which I first swapped out with the new Western Digital, AND the new Western Digital were all ok, but the bay it self has failed? After all the Toshiba also showed as failed in this bay, but is OK in another? Has anyone else experienced this in a Drobo FS, or maybe a 5N?

Apparently WD has been secretly and deceptively using SMR hard drives without warning or label.

It’s being reported that SMR drives can cause issues in existing raid setups.

I purchased a 6TB WD RED Drive to go with my 3TB WD RED drives in my Drobo 5D. Long story short, everything went weird and now the drobo is critical. It ends up the 6TB RED is a SMR drive now. Like you, Bay 1 (the second from the top) is flashing red. Since the drobo was low on space - all the other drives are showing solid red.

Thankfully for me because I had dual redundancy after 15 hours my drobo managed to complete rebuilding with the 2nd new drive (Toshiba this time) in a bay where I had a very small drive. I am loathed to purchase a new drive for the second bay in case it wipes out the new drive or the drobo completely.

That’s great to hear.
Looks like your issue isn’t SMR related like mine. Like you, I thought a hard drive was a drive. Often times, this spec isn’t even listed on the product specs sheet. In WD case, it seems like they were purposefully hiding the info from consumers who were asking about it.

Western Digital, Seagate and Toshiba have begun selling SMR drives without labeling them as such, thus revealing a large controversy, as SMR drives are much slower in some circumstances than PMR drives. These practices were used to be in both data storage-dedicated (for servers, NASes and cold storage) and consumer-centric HDDs.